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BRASILIA (Reuters) – The Brazilian government must present a detailed vaccination plan against covid-19 before November 30, including a possible national campaign to begin immunization on January 20, said Piauí Governor Wellington Dias (PT ), after participating today in the meeting with the Minister of Health, Eduardo Pazuello, and other governors.
“By the end of November, a technical chamber that has been created … will present the details of the vaccination strategy so that we have time to implement it,” the governor said in an interview with Reuters after the meeting.
“You will have to take care of the investments right now to guarantee the storage, qualification and training of the teams that are going to do the vaccination. And the other point is the perspective of until mid-January, around January 15 to 20, to have the start of the vaccination process, it may be even earlier, but conservatively, the schedule set is this level ”.
According to Dias, the ministry agreed with the governors’ suggestion that there be an order of priority to receive the vaccine and that it be scheduled. The intention is to first immunize those who have comorbidities or are older than 60 years, the group responsible for the majority of deaths from covid-19.
At the meeting, Pazuello said that the potential Chinese Sinovac vaccine against covid-19 will be incorporated into the National Immunization Program, despite President Jair Bolsonaro’s criticism of the immunizer that the Butantan Institute in São Paulo will produce in the country. linked to the government of discontent João Doria (PSDB).
The federal government promised to buy 46 million doses of the vaccine produced by Butantan until December 2020, according to notes from the Ministry and the São Paulo government, for the first stage of vaccination, after approval by Anvisa. According to Dias, another 60 million doses should continue in January.
At the meeting, according to the governor, it was said that the expectation is that the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford – the first contracted by the Ministry of Health and which was the main hope of immunization in the country – should only be ready in February.
Asked about the politicization of the vaccine issue, Dias minimized. “We come up with concrete things. Regardless of the parties, who is the government and who is the opposition, we are trying to save lives.”
OBLIGATORY
The governor said that the ministry should carry out a vaccination campaign, with the support of the states, but said Pazuello emphasized that there will be no mandatory use of the immunizer, in line with what Bolsonaro has publicly said.
“The minister, at one point, stated that the idea of the ministry is not to have this obligation, but there will be a vaccine for everyone who wants to be vaccinated,” he said.
During the preparation of the plan, according to the governor, the authorities should use a fine-tooth comb in the 51,000 health posts that exist in Brazil to assess which of them are technically fit to receive the vaccines.
The intention is that, according to the government, there is a control so that a person who takes a dose of the vaccine produced by Butantan receives the second dose from the same laboratory, and that this also happens with the AstraZeneca immunizer, which will be prepared in the Brasil de la Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, and any other vaccine that enters the immunization program.
